Digital Feminist Activism and Imagining the Future: the case study of the ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ Protest in Iran

My research project investigates Iranian women’s collective imagination of the future by focusing on the experience of doing digital feminist activism during the “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising in Iran. I am particularly interested in exploring feminist digital activism both as a crucial component of the recent uprising and as part of the practice of feminism in women’s everyday lives, with a focus on the mediation of affect through connective technologies. Applying a digital ethnographic approach, the research seeks to understand how digital media impacts the ways in which the protests take shape and how women find a voice across multiple platforms and spaces, bringing together street protests and Twitter wars in a new feminist practice. The focus of this project is on how affective publics or counterpublics, enabled by the affordances of digital media, shape the affective political formation of Iranian women and their life experiences of inequality.